Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: DTS on Blu Ray

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Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 02-07-2009, 01:16 PM:

Although I do not play them anymore, I still have a very large collection of laserdiscs with DTS sound and I also have many early DVDs that were released with a full bit rate DTS track like the larger discs from Universal Home Video such as JURASSIC PARK, WATER WORLD, THE SHADOW and several others. There was a time when Universal and a few other studios such as Fox would release their new titles with DTS sound very frequently on standard DVD but I seem to notice it has now trickled down to nothing. It was only after I had acquired a BD player that I had noticed that almost half of the high definition video disc catalog features discs with full bit rate DTS sound and this pleases me very much. I have INDEPENDENCE DAY on a full bit rate laserdisc as well as a Dolby 5.1 on standard DVD and DTS on Blue Ray and the BD sound is superb! As much as I had enjoyed the DTS on laserdisc and the Dolby on standard DVD, the BD had produced sound I had never heard before in DTS. Prior to watching the movie in it's entirety on BD, I compared both the standard DVD and the BD and found the picture quality on my standard television to be much brighter and colorful from the HD disc . I am not sure if Dolby EX existed when ID4 was released but what I heard in DTS from the BD disc sure sounded it has because my rear surround was very active as well as my other surround speakers. The ID4 soundtrack was almost as good as the DTS sound on the the new KING KONG Blue Ray disc which I had also enjoyed.

-Claude

Posted by Chris Slycord (Member # 4239) on 02-07-2009, 02:55 PM:

It could very well be that they remixed the soundtrack to have a rear channel since the original release.

And btw, it's blu-ray and not blue-ray (even though the former is a dumb name).

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 02-07-2009, 03:58 PM:

You have Waterworld and Independence Day in your collection???

Oh the shame. [Eek!]

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 02-07-2009, 04:38 PM:

Sorry about that, Brad [Big Grin]

Both of these films are guilty pleasures of mine especially ID4

-Claude

Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 02-07-2009, 05:04 PM:

quote: Claude S. Ayakawa
especially ID4

That's a good movie right up to the point where Will Smith slugs the alien in the ... nose? After that it deteriorates. (The movie, not the alien)

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-07-2009, 06:20 PM:

quote: Claude S. Ayakawa
I still have a very large collection of laserdiscs with DTS sound and I also have many early DVDs that were released with a full bit rate DTS track like the larger discs from Universal Home Video such as JURASSIC PARK, WATER WORLD, THE SHADOW and several others.

I have a few of those "bare bones" DTS DVDs from Universal, such as The Jackal and Apollo 13. A few releases from Dreamworks, such as The Prince of Egypt and Galaxy Quest featured DTS tracks at full 1509kb/s rates and had the same extras as the mainstream DD 5.1 DVD versions.

BTW, the DTS version of Jurassic Park was at the lower 754kb/s bit rate. I was disappointed the disc didn't feature the original DTS trailer (the "sonic landscape" piano trailer really wasn't appropriate for that kind of movie). I also exchanged the original disc for a "fixed" version that actually had some sub-bass in the .1 channel. Eventually the "fixed" version filtered out to retailers that bothered to carry the DTS version.

quote: Claude S. Ayakawa
I have INDEPENDENCE DAY on a full bit rate laserdisc as well as a Dolby 5.1 on standard DVD and DTS on Blue Ray and the BD sound is superb! As much as I had enjoyed the DTS on laserdisc and the Dolby on standard DVD, the BD had produced sound I had never heard before in DTS.

Are you just listening to the lossy DTS "core" or are you listening to the full, lossless DTS-HD Master Audio track?

I have a copy of the Independence Day Blu-ray. The audio is very good -even only in lossy DTS. However, I wasn't very impressed with the image quality. Kind of soft. I think Fox used an old HD master, possibly something where film was run through a telecine in real time rather than precision scanned the way modern films (and new restorations) are treated.

quote: Claude S. Ayakawa
There was a time when Universal and a few other studios such as Fox would release their new titles with DTS sound very frequently on standard DVD but I seem to notice it has now trickled down to nothing. It was only after I had acquired a BD player that I had noticed that almost half of the high definition video disc catalog features discs with full bit rate DTS sound and this pleases me very much.

The situation with Blu-ray is very different.

Every Blu-ray player is required to have built in decoding for both Dolby Digital and DTS. The players must also be able to at least output 2 channel analog stereo of both formats for basic TV connection. Naturally, any Blu-ray player will be able to send the surround audio in various forms too.

DTS was only an optional audio format for DVD. That, and the limited amount of space on the disc caused studios like Universal to stop using DTS on many of their DVDs.

Since a DTS-HD Master Audio track has a built in, backward compatible lossy DTS core, it's possible for some Blu-ray movie releases to have only one audio track on the disc and have it encoded in DTS-HD Master Audio. I think Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven BD is one example.

Because of the built in compatibility for both DD and DTS, certain movie studios like Fox and Universal are using the DTS-HD Master Audio format exclusively on nearly all of their Blu-ray releases. Lionsgate and MGM also use DTS-HD Master Audio on the majority of their releases. Lately Criterion has been getting into the Blu-ray game and making heavy use of DTS-HD Master Audio. Even Disney has started using DTS-HD Master Audio on some of its recent Blu-ray discs.

Licensing cost must be a factor in why DTS-HD Master Audio has a much greater degree of popularity on Blu-ray than DTS did on DVD.

Some studios, such as Warner Bros. are firmly in the Dolby TrueHD camp. However, Warner Bros. is very strangely using a lot of BD-25 single layer discs and only lossy Dolby Digital on some of its Blu-ray releases. This has generated a lot of anger among home theater enthusiasts. The other major studios use dual layer BD-50 discs and lossless audio on almost all their releases.

quote: Chris Slycord
It could very well be that they remixed the soundtrack to have a rear channel since the original release.

I agree it's possible Fox could have been using a different audio master for the Blu-ray. However, the audio track is just straight 5.1. I'm not sure if Fox has released any movies on Blu-ray with 7.1 channel audio tracks.

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 02-07-2009, 06:23 PM:

Mike,

I saw ID4 at the packed Waikiki #2 in Honolulu on opening night and enjoyed the film very much. While many of my friends also share my fondness for the film, I also have some who totally disliked the movie. We have had very serious debate about the movie but nothing ever became of it. I thought it was a very good science fiction movie that required one not to take everything in the movie very serious. I have been doing that every time I see it and that is the reason I have been enjoying ID4 all these years.

Bobby, because my Denon AVR 3802 is old, I am unable to play back DTS in HD Master AudIo but in only standard DTS. Despite it, I have found the audio from both Dolby and DTS track on almost every BD I play on my Panasonic DMP BD35 is very gutsy.

-Claude

Posted by Aaron Garman (Member # 1653) on 02-08-2009, 10:46 PM:

I'm wondering, for the ID4 LaserDiscs, if the tracks back then were being re-mixed at all for home theater. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most films nowadays get mixes made for the cinema, as well as a near field mix for home theater? If so, are they using that near field mix on Blu Ray?

I know many have said that several LaserDisc DTS (and AC3 tracks for that matter) are superior to their DVD counterparts. The only LaserDiscs I've been able to compare with Blu Ray was Mission: Impossible. To be honest, I preferred the AC3 track off the LaserDisc.

It's too bad we can't get Pioneer to make some newer, modern LaserDisc players for us diehards.

AJG

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 02-08-2009, 11:18 PM:

They were making LaserDisc players up until a few months ago I believe.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-09-2009, 12:55 AM:

Apparently Pioneer is in some deep shit.

Pioneer reportedly ending TV production, spinning off DVD business

quote:
by Richard Lawler, posted Feb 6th 2009 at 6:23PM
Say it ain't so (again) Pioneer, Japan's Nikkei is reporting that despite planning a return to profitability by sourcing Panasonic plasma panels, facing a consolidated loss of 100 billion yen ($1.08 billion U.S.) it will end TV development and production entirely. The DVD business will be spun off into a new venture with Sharp as part of a plan to shed several thousand employees over the next year, including a shutdown of its Shizuoka plant, along with already planned closings in the U.S. and Europe. Honestly, we should have seen things were going badly when it let LaserDisc die, but the worsening economy may have proved too tough for the idea that its Kuro and Elite line of products would not be subject to the ups and downs of the economy.

The only reasoning that immediately comes to mind for the cause of Pioneer's troubles is they were concentrating far too much on the high end and not giving enough of a shit about mainstream consumers.

The 60" Grand Kuro plasma HDTV is a very nice television set. However, very few people are going to drop $5000-$6000 for one of those things. For most people, the term "plasma" is interchangeable for any plasma TV. There are cheap plasma-based television sets that are just outright crap. And then there those high quality sets like the Kuro that stand well apart from others. But most people are too ill-informed to ever understand the difference. And with the economy in severe recession, someone hunting for a plasma TV is going to choose something cheaper. They just see the plasma term and pull the trigger on the model least damaging to the wallet.

And then look at how Pioneer set up its Blu-ray player business. What a pooch screw. While companies like Panasonic, Sony and Samsung were gearing up to release full-featured BD Live profile 2.0 BD players, Pioneer chose to release limited functioning profile 1.1 players with really high prices. Sticking a damned "elite" badge on the unit doesn't change much of anything in the equation. A well informed Blu-ray player customer is going to be looking further into the nuts and bolts of how the player performs rather than just being blown away by the gold trim on the player's front panel. Why in the hell spend $1000+ on some very limited "elite" player when you can buy a PS3 for several hundred less and have something with a far greater level of function (not to mention the BD player with the fastest disc loading and Internet downloading speed)?

Pioneer's troubles is a classic example of a company who lost touch with the ever changing nature of the consumer electronics market.

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 02-09-2009, 03:17 PM:

Bobby,

When I play a BD with DTS HD Master Audio, my Denon receiver automatically goes to DTS and I do not have to select the sound format in the menu like I have to do with DVDs. Because my receiver is old, I am only getting standard DTS and not the full DTS HD Master Audio. but I think the sound seem to be much better than DTS from DVDs. Is it my imagination when I feel the DTS 5.1 and even Dolby 5.1 sound better than from standard DVDs on Blu Ray?

-Claude

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 02-09-2009, 07:36 PM:

If your BD player is connected to the Denon receiver with a standard optical cable the BD player automatically sends the DTS core without you having to do anything else.

The DVD format typically featured Dolby Digital tracks at 448kb/s and 384kb/s data rates. Most DVDs with DTS had the lower 754kb/s rate.

Dolby Digital tracks on Blu-ray are often set at the maximum 640kb/s level -a pretty significant jump above DVD standards. DTS, either by itself or as a lossy core in DTS-HD Master Audio tracks is almost always 1509kb/s -double the data rate typically used on DVD.

Those differences alone can yield noticeable results. However, one cannot factor out the possibility of movie studios going back and doing further tweaking to the actual mix and creating a new master for use in a Blu-ray release.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 02-09-2009, 08:18 PM:

I've noticed that on DVDs and even many Blu-Rays, DTS is mixed louder than Dolby Digital or Dolby TrueHD. People equate "louder" with "better" and assume that DTS is better for this reason alone. I have taken the same 5.1 mix and encoded it in both DTS and Dolby Digital for DVD (maximum bitrates for both) and the audible difference isn't tremendously appreciable. The bitrate certainly won't make one louder vs the other.

Posted by Mike Olpin (Member # 1115) on 02-10-2009, 12:26 AM:

On the Elf BluRay I noticed that the TrueHD mix had a ton more LFE as compared with the standard Dolby Digital track. I know regular DD is capable of reproducing room shaking bass, so why is that mix neutered?

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 02-10-2009, 01:36 AM:

When you watch the regular Dolby Digital track, are you selecting something entirely differently in the BD sound menu, or are you listening to the TrueHD track as it cores down? Even if you are listening over a standard optical cable on a receiver that doesn't support it, you should select TrueHD anyway.

Posted by Claude S. Ayakawa (Member # 1401) on 02-10-2009, 05:33 PM:

I just watched for the 2nd time, COPYING BEETHOVEN a DVD I bought several months when it was released. The movie is about a fictional woman character who had helped Ludwig Van Beethoven by copying his original score of the work for the premier of his 9th symphony in 1824. When I first played the DVD after I got it on my Denon DVD player, the 5.1 Dolby soundtrack sounded very good and I had enjoyed it very much. Last night was a totally different experience when I played the DVD on my new Panasonic Blu Ray player. Although the receiver and the speakers were exactly the same as before, the sound I heard from this DVD absolutely blew me away especially during the scenes during the 9th symphony premier. I will now have to watch my concert DVD of the Beethoven 9th symphony with Claudio Abado conducting the Vienna Philharmonic on my new BD player and see if the sound is almost as good as what I had heard last night. With the superb sound I am hearing for the very first time from DVDS I have in my collection, I think the Blu Ray player was a very good investment.

-Claude